Whoa

This is a really neat new feature of the Northeastern University library catalog:

Unless you spend the next 10 minutes taking screen shots and blogging about it, this is really convenient. And it saves our precious reserves of little scraps of paper.

Scheme record syntax

I think if I were designing my own Scheme I'd tighten up some of the aspects of PLT's structs into a smaller syntactic footprint. In PLT, when you say

(define-struct thing (foo bar))

it binds thing to an identifier carrying static information about the struct type (which is needed for other macros such as match), struct:thing to a runtime value containing introspective information about the struct type, and make-thing to a constructor for the struct type.

I think I would just bind the single identifier thing for all three purposes: statically, it would carry the static information for match and friends; dynamically, it would be the constructor. (I never liked the imperative-sounding "make-" prefix.) For dynamic introspection, I would probably include a library form where you could say (struct foo) to reflect the struct type information into a dynamic value.